Blow into the microphone on your iPhone or iPod Touch (iTouch), and watch beautifully rendered Balloonimals spring to life. After the balloon inflates, give your phone a shake. Voila! With each shake, a Balloonimal takes shape. Soon, your Balloonimal appears ready to play. Now, pet your Balloonimal and see what tricks it can do.

Great for kids of all ages, Balloonimals is packed with an entire collection of colorful, fully animated balloon animals, including a fish, duck, T-Rex, and unicorn. Fun, fancy pets that go where you go!

With Balloonimals, there’s no need for a clown. Now you're in control. This iPhone app makes a great addition to any celebration – fun for birthdays, family reunions, or any play date!

The Making Of Balloonimals

Following our Party Whistle iPhone app, we were raring to design a second iPhone application. Party Whistle taught us that kids really love blowing into the phone to activate the application. It’s easy to do, and the resulting animation is dynamic and fun. Building off this, we tapped Toy Lab’s kid experts to brainstorm for more classic play patterns, specifically looking for a theme that would resonate with 2- to 6-year-olds. Then, we stumbled on the idea of balloon animals. And, really, who doesn’t love balloon animals?

Inspired, we set to work. We started with the real thing, inviting balloon artist Cesare to come play. He filled our workspace with a whole zoo of fabulous balloon animals. From there, we had to figure out how to get these animals into an iPhone and bring them to life.

We initially thought that stop-action animation would be the way to go. We photographed our animals from every angle and played with stringing the images together to create an animation.

However, we found a better way. Computer rendering allowed us to not only capture the feel of a real balloon animal, but it also let us exaggerate features to give the animals more character. Better still, it gave us the freedom to dream up new animals that had yet to be seen in balloon form.

The animals evolved with the addition of color, transparency, light, and reflection. These renderings were then animated to give each animal a choreographed action to match its personality. Meanwhile, our friends at Red Dot Media did an amazing job designing the sounds, an array of squeaks, stomps, quacks, and roars that enliven the Balloonimals experience.

When I showed my baby Balloonimals, he grabbed the phone out of my hand and kissed the screen. It was adorable!

— Alex (dad)

A flawless execution to a lovely idea brings this app into the best-toddler-apps hall of fame.

— best-toddler-apps.org

Balloonimals still knows how to entertain in the year 2014, the funny animals and animations will surely entertain and bring lots of joy to children.